Hacking Your Supplements - How to Make a SuperFood Multi-Vitamin

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

What's cracking, National (pun intended)?

Hope everyone is having a great week. As with the first couple
weeks of every trimester you have some extra time to work on little
side projects that interest you before you have to bear down and
learn the class materials for midterms/finals. Talking with most
classmates, nobody does anything for the first 3 weeks of classes
unless they have a notoriously hard class (such as Tumors,
Neuroanatomy, Biochem, etc). As always, I don't teach idleness, I
always urge investments of time into exploring your
curiosities.

A couple quick ideas to become a better doc/lead a
better life are:

Study past seminar notes.

Take out a book on nutrition from the library (or off
Amazon/borrow from friend)

Grab some buddies and ask an experienced upper tri student to
work on adjusting (consider setting up weekly meetings. That's how
our Monday Gonstead adjusting gathering came to be, led by Jordan
Bray. Go to the clinic and request him. He's the best in the
clinic. Might as well go to the best. :)

Make a workout program based on restoring functional deficits
and rehab.

Make a great healthy Paleo meal for dinner (optional: with
friends/family).

Make your own supplements! (Haha How to do so is below!)

Idle (pre-midterm/final) time should not
be used for:

Watching TV

Being lazy

Doing anything not related to bettering yourself as a person or
a doctor.

Seriously people, you are going to owe $150,000+ graduating from
the same curriculum as 100+ chiropractic students. It begs the
question: What are you doing that differentiates yourself from the
rest of your class? Do you have a unique certification? Are you the
best adjustor? Do you do acupuncture? Nutrition? Homeopathy? You
get where I'm going here?

Sometimes difficult questions are the most important to start
with. You'll thank me later when new patient John Smith walks into
your office, instead of Joe Schmo, DC, down the street, because he
heard you did something great and different and were getting the
best treatment results. If your answer to, "Why should I come to
you?" is "I got a great education at National" or "I'm a good
people person" you have a rude world coming your way. Good
marketing and people skills get people in your door, yes, but great
treating and results keep them there and develop a referral
practice you never have to market because your treatment results
speak for themselves. I digress. :)

How To Make a SuperFood Supplement

I've always been curious about supplements. I've probably tried
every one on the market by now. I do A LOT of experiments on
myself. The best selling and (most widely used/researched) are
multi-vitamins. Multis are extremely practical since they are
affordable and fill the gaps in your nutritional arsenal that are
left from eating a sub-optimal diet of foods that are raising in a
sub-optimal (and therefore less nutritionally dense)
environment.

The glaring problem I've found with multi-vitamins is they are
synthetic and isolated. For example, Vitamin C is widely used as
ascorbic acid in supplements. Research has proven it to be
extremely valuable. However, why did nature pair it with
bioflavonoids and other co-factors but Man decided to isolate just
one molecule? Did we think we can outsmart nature simply because we
found that the majority of the benefit is from a single molecule.
That isn't the case in nature, nothing exists in isolation and the
true biological potential comes in the synergistic relationship of
MULTIPLE cofactors and coenzymes.

Nature pairs multiple compounds together not only for more
bioavailability but also to increase metabolically beneficial
actions. When you strip nutrients into single compounds, the body
has to use its own stores to offset the co-factors missing from the
"Vitamin Complex" and in some cases, according to Dr. Francis, the
patient can experience a "rebound deficiency." In other words, you
might be taking a Vitamin C complex but have symptomatology that
mimics C deficiency because your body stores of the compounds that
work with the C have run low because you've been taking an
isolated, man-made synthetic supplement for a while.

So, how do we fix this, get our cake and eat it, too? In other
words how do we still get the benefits of multi-vitamins while also
respecting the healing wisdom of nature with nutritionally superior
ingredients?

We use combinations of the most nutritionally dense (highest
concentration of vitamins/minerals per ounce) foods/herbs on the
planet...AKA = SUPERFOODS!

Through exhaustive research for a couple years and talking with
many NDs and a few supplement company CEOs, here's the list I
compiled. It features a broad array of foods that synergistically
act as a nature's most potent multivitamin to give you lasting
natural energy, boosting your immune system, improving your mood,
increasing your metabolism, and overall making you FEEL WAY BETTER!
Some even have said it can substitute for their morning
coffee.